Tile by Tile: Engaging Teens with Scrabble and the English Lexicon
3 days ago
2 min read
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Ah, Scrabble. The ultimate arena where vocabulary triumphs and three-letter words go to die. Or at least that’s how it feels when you’re on the losing end, wondering how ‘qi’ is legal and yet your best offering is still ‘dog’. If, like me, you've long harboured a deep resentment for the game, you’re in good company. My Scrabble loathing dates back to whenever I first realised my brain could only conjure up such 3 letter words, no matter how hard I tried. And so, like any self-respecting teenager faced with something they couldn’t master, I declared Scrabble dead to me.
Enter: a Croatian boat trip and an online Scrabble support site. Turns out that with a bit of help and some inventive rule-bending, Scrabble becomes less about inevitable failure and more about smug triumphs over words like ‘kine’ (the collective noun for cows), ‘logan’ (fabric, not Wolverine), and ‘autoecious’ (a parasite living its best life on a single host). Pure, unadulterated glory. Try as I might, though, bhagwan is not allowed… a desert tent, an Indian lesser known deity, an alternative to the tote bag?
Of course, this was no ordinary game. We had a special twist: you could only claim your points if you could define all your words on the board. Fail to do so? Prepare for an opponent to swoop in and snatch your score in the most spectacular fashion. It’s a rule that truly shines in marathon sessions or, if you’re like us, when you keep track of scores for weeks. Yes, we’re that kind of people.
Now, I know what you’re thinking - where’s the tutoring angle in all of this? For starters, Scrabble is essentially wordy warfare. Expanding your vocabulary, playing around with obscure terms, and flexing that linguistic muscle is exactly what helps score those top marks in English exams. Take the GCSE English Language paper, for example - it explicitly rewards a robust lexicon. So, if you’re battling to get your teens off TikTok and onto something remotely educational, a sneaky game of Scrabble might just do the trick. Bonus: phones are compulsory.
We used the Collins Scrabble & Word Finder, by the way. Feel free to Google it, though I suspect you already have.
Still wondering if your teenager will ever voluntarily engage in educational board games with you? With the right approach, they’ll go from grudging participants to accidental enthusiasts - and yes, it’ll show in their exam results. Fancy a free 20-minute chat to see if one-on-one tutoring could be the next big thing for your child? Drop me a line at The LangLit Studio: thelanglitstudio@gmail.com. Go on, you know you want to.